"It looks like the first part of my KDE 3.5 previews was extremely popular. Much more than I could ever anticipated. I even got Slashdotted. Anyway, here is the second part of the look into KDE's near future. Enjoy the tour!"

but, when are they going to make it look more elegant or professional?

I know there is a plethera of stuff to completely re-work the way it looks to your own tastes, but its really hard to take the default "toy" look serously. Seriously, the crystal icons and electric blue so prominently on display reminds me of user intefaces/cartoons/webpages designed for my 2yo child.

A 'look' is all subjective. What you might call elegant, I might call bland. What I call eye catching you might call shocking.

Read the blogs at planetkde.org and you will discover that they are working on cleaning 3.5 up and streamlining it too. Artwork (icons, wallpapers, colors & themes) for 3.5 is not ready and the Klax 3.5 alpha ships with most of the 3.4 artwork. As for the KDE 4.0 release (1+ year away), they are activly pursuing usability and along with functionality.

Yes, the default look is Plastik. It is however _very_ easy to change Plastik to a less stylized & more 'flat' style. Visit kde-look.org for artwork & GUI stuff. Visit kde-artists.org to see them working on future GUI stuff.

Clearlooks and Plastik are almost identical! The only difference is colour - and guess what you can have different colour schemes in kde themes - just change the colour scheme. Please show me the orange in the kde default colour scheme?

Clearlooks and Plastik are almost identical! The only difference is colour

Almost, yeah... If Clearlooks and Plastik are identical, then Plastik and Luna are also identical. These themes all use roughly the same drawing style, but the overall appearance is very different.

I still believe that Plastik was about the best free desktop style for its time, but I also believe that it needs a little overhaul.

If Qt will support Cairo at some point, we could even cooperate on the themes. Richard already abstracted Clearlooks-cairo in a way that would make it trivial to use the same drawing routines in another toolkit. And of course Cairo will allow much more sophisticated themes to be created.

And it was nonsens then too, please take a look at those desktops made by companies who employ lots of designers and other professionals to work on their look. And the fact is according to the metrics you use, they look even more like "toys". Please take your opinion and go back to mastrubate over the perfect elegance and professional look of your beloved Gnome, and stop trolling here.

Nice...so civil. Btw, I don't use Gnome, I use OSX....and my 2 servers are SuSE and Gentoo with KDE only.

Its funny that you mention perfect elegance and professional look when referring to Gnome though....you must agree with my point to some degree. Honestly, I was merely commenting on ...yes, my opinion...and so stated....the unprofessional default look. But, thats ok, because apparently they will be addressing those complaints in 3.5.

Ain't these KDE users lovely?
Sometimes one get tired of haering the same uselss drivel and nonsen over and over. Even non KDE users usually does, that's why mostly anti KDE trolls and flamers frequent these treads and not oher non KDE'ers.

Nobody has mentioned GNOME but you.
With the look of Os X and XP both more flashy than KDE, the only one less so are Gnome QED.

Sometimes one get tired of haering the same uselss drivel and nonsen over and over. Even non KDE users usually does, that's why mostly anti KDE trolls and flamers frequent these treads and not oher non KDE'ers.

There will be always another KDE troll trying to defent another KDE troll, it never ends.

Perhaps mine was trollish, but not more than intended. I'm rater sick of those trolls in every tread mentioning KDE, and using the "my opinion" disguise does not make it any less troll. If your opinions match those of known trolling, back it up whit facts or else you only troll. Opinion or not.

Ok, my bad. Morty's Opinion is the only aloud. Nothing else can be a fact or hold any water unless it passes Morty's seal of approval. Therefore, bright colors, and most prominently electric blue, is a stunning display of elegance and asthetics. I see my post was modded down...thats great. I make a reasonable comment, he responds like a jackass....so I get modded. What a joke.....and I'm an effing KDE user.

Perhaps mine was trollish, but not more than intended. I'm rater sick of those trolls in every tread mentioning KDE, and using the "my opinion" disguise does not make it any less troll. If your opinions match those of known trolling, back it up whit facts or else you only troll. Opinion or not.

Maybe you should get a life to avoid taking opinions about KDE personal.

The beauty of KDE is in it's functionality and workflow. For example, you can't bean the fish// protocol with inline editing of remote files in KDE applications. Screenshots will simply never capture the full capability of KDE.

While we're at KIO-slaves, let me mention audiocd:/.
Just insert an Audio CD, go to audiocd:/ in konqueror, and it shows you virtual folders named 'MP3', 'OGG', 'CDA', 'FLAC', and they contain virtual files in the respective formats which you can just drag&drop to your usb key or hard disk drive, and it then encodes the music on the fly in the desired format (no WMA is not available )

Let the Konqueror programmers get rid of those outrageous tool-bars and icons. The location and search bar can be squeezed in that space I see on the "back", "forward" and "home" icons tool-bar. As it is now, valuable real estate is being wasted. Besides, even after customizing, the tool bars sometimes forget their settings. At this point, getting them back to normal is almost impossible.

I can't get it. KDE has a great toolkit (maybe the best one), great technology (e.g. kioslaves) but the overall desktop is just bad. I see it like Matthias Ettrich, the founder of KDE: "I get the feeling we do embedding and morphing not because its useful, but because we can."

I would love to use KDE, just because i love it to code with Qt.

But just look at the new tooltips. Big, ugly and mostly useless. I you point with the cursor on the kicker, who needs a list of all windows? Maybe you need it once in 1000 cases, at the rest 999 situation it just bugging.

The tooltip is just one example. I feel, that the KDE Hackers implement every function which they needed at one day even if thay doesn't need it for the rest of their life. That leaves us with KDE programs with 101 features which are really nice if you want to show someone the power of your desktop but on the daily use, most people just don't need it and the only think these features does is getting in the way.

Just insert an Audio CD, go to audiocd:/ in konqueror, and it shows you virtual folders named 'MP3', 'OGG', 'CDA', 'FLAC', and they contain virtual files in the respective formats which you can just drag&drop to your usb key or hard disk drive, and it then encodes the music on the fly in the desired format (no WMA is not available )

Arthur is not as powerfull as Cairo, that is why TrollTech is working (or was) in integrate Cairo as a backend.

Maybe you want to read this, from Zack Rusin's blog:

Also people have been asking me about Cairo so lets get something clear: right now there's no point in Arthur using Cairo. There's just absolutely no good reason for it. I will be closely watching Cairo and if the need arises I'll start working on fixing the issues we have with it, but as of right now there's just no good reason for KDE to be using Cairo. None. None whatsoever. Please do reread the last paragraph.

I don't understand why, in one minute, my score has gone down to -2. What's wrong with my comment ? If you think it was offtopic, then its parent was too, so you should also have modded it down, or let me reply to it. Now my comment's censored, that's unfair.

> Or, there is a silly person with far too much moderation power here.

Yes, that's probably it. And I think I even have an idea who that could be although that won't help much. But I don't even think that person has any special privileges. I guess he just invented some virtual friends (multiple troll accounts).

c'mon, KDE hasn't become much bigger since 3.3! its getting leaner and leaner. yes, there where features added, but also many simplified or hidden between 'advanced' buttons and sub-menu's. and ok, konqueror only lost 2 icons yet, but it'll lose another 2-3 in KDE 3.5, and there might be a better seperation of filemanager and webbrowser, at least the profile-system will be enhanced - there 2-3 other icons leave us.

but many other apps, like kontact (kmail, korganizer) got extensive usabillity studies, and where changed accordingly.

about the tooltip: I LOVE IT. in 3.5, it gives information about the applications on each desktop when you move the mouse over the pager picture. invaluable, really. the 'lock panels' feature will make the panels 'static' so you (or someone else) won't make changes you didn't want to.

and it is NOT true they implement every thing they think off. i've seen several bugreports being closed with WONTFIX because the dev's and other posters concluded the feature was only used by few, if any users.

ok, its not perfect yet. but getting better fast. many people are working on the usabillity part, and sometimes you are amazed by the results of their work!

Cool, but who cares if BeOS did this four years ago? Guess what, the audiocd-KIO was already present in KDE 2.0, released 2001 (hey, four years ago!)! That means the code was probably in CVS since 1999 or 2000...

I have and the KDE developers refuse to listen. I've made suggestions and sometimes mockups regarding:

Konqueror user-profiles and why they don't work
Simplifying Kprint
A Gnome like K-menu
Simplifying Korganizer
Scalable usability via Kxmlgui (like the performance tuner)
Universal document viewer which was ignored and now they have okular as a Summer of Code project. Pfft

The KDE developers don't care, they are happy with the status quo regardless of what they say.

"DE is under GPL license, get people who agree with you and create a fork."

Also people have been asking me about Cairo so lets get something clear: right now there's no point in Arthur using Cairo. There's just absolutely no good reason for it. I will be closely watching Cairo and if the need arises I'll start working on fixing the issues we have with it, but as of right now there's just no good reason for KDE to be using Cairo.

I read that before, It is a petty, vecause other projects like Mozilla, Openoffice will use Cairo, that would only isolate KDE from interoperability, I hope they give support for it.

And about Cairo stability, It is the same KDE developers said about SVG graphics and look, GNOME ate the SVG cake first and KDE didn't cach it till 3.3, maybe it was buggy, but most of users didn't noted the gliches while GNOME develoeprs where fix in it and if no one test it then, When will become stable?

Cairo is stable enought to be used, it is a petty that KDE is not working with it, if they decided to work with Arthur then good for them, but at the end that can be translated in more work when Cairo becomes the standar and stable.

I read that before, It is a petty, vecause other projects like Mozilla, Openoffice will use Cairo, that would only isolate KDE from interoperability, I hope they give support for it.

Mozilla and Open Office will not be using Cairo, although they may use it indirectly in the future through GTK. And petty? This NIH syndrome bullshit KDE keeps getting accused of is just silly. It doesn't exist.

Cairo is non-existant crap at the moment. It isn't finished, has very serious performance issues and at this point in time no project should really be using it in a heavy way. The only reason why people talk about it as the greatest thing since sliced bread and that everyone should be using is the fact that everyone thinks it will give them wonderful eye candy to do what Longhorn (Vista) will, or wants, to do.

It is the same KDE developers said about SVG graphics and look, GNOME ate the SVG cake first and KDE didn't cach it till 3.3

Yes. And KDE adopted it when it was ready.

but most of users didn't noted the gliches while GNOME develoeprs where fix in it and if no one test it then, When will become stable?

SVG was certainly tested in and around KDE for a very long time, but no one threw KDE into it until it was fully ready. Just because KDE hasn't fully adopted something, doesn't mean it isn't actually tested ;-).

Cairo is stable enought to be used

No, it isn't.

but at the end that can be translated in more work when Cairo becomes the standar and stable.

Who says Cairo is actually going to work properly or even become a standard? I think some people have very strange ideas about what constitutes a standard.

Besides, Cairo is only a drawing API really, isn't anything massively spectacular, and Arthur could quite easily use it eventually as a back-end. That's why he said, there's not point in Arthur using Cairo.

It makes no sense at all for KDE to use Cairo. Ignoring, for a moment, that Cairo is not finished and it's API / ABI are not yet stable, remember that Cairo is basically just a drawing API. It's not some deep change to the underlying architecture, it's not incompatible with standard X stuff, doesn't replace anything, and it's not really anything revolutionary. It's just a (decent) drawing API.

The key technologies that Cairo runs on are the X Render extension, and OpenGL (via Glitz). Qt's Arthur is also a painting API, and it uses the exact same underlying technologies as Cairo does. You can (or will be able to do) just about anything with Arthur that you could do with Cairo (and the reverse is also true). Advancements to the underlying architecture (like better RENDER acceleration) will equally benefit both systems, and they will run absolutely fine side by side.

So why would KDE not using Cairo somehow harm interoperability between Gnome and KDE? KDE and Gnome also use different graphical toolkits, different object systems, they're written in different programming languages, and so on. The painting API makes very little difference to functionality.

Good points there, maybe it is different something like KDE ang GNOME in toolkits, but instead of try to unite technologies to work more close they are putting a barrier to make a larger abism, if KDE has decided to go that way its ok, it is their desition and they are taking it for what they believe it is for the goodness of the project, but in a a large time will be a risky movement.

Yes, i can see how it is very risky movement using something that is build into the toolkit that they are already using instead of using incomplete technology </sarcasm>

This simply doesn't matter, as already stated, both are just drawing apis, using the same technology behind the scenes. Using the same will not magically make programs better at interoperability. And as others have already mentioned, cairo is not complete, using it will be a risky movement as the api might change, while Arthur is ready NOW.

Since cairo is built on top of X, that actually makes a point of why they should NOT use it, as it would go against the trend of making KDE independent from X. QT supports many platforms, and making KDE use arthur will make it so it can be compiled natively on other platforms without a need for an X server (windows and mac os)

When I say risky, Im talking about projects that have nothing to do with KDE or GNOME but affect them in some way like OpenOffice, Mozilla, etc. if these project had decided to go with Cairo this will make it easier for GNOME but not for KDE, sure, they can`t take the source code and translate it to Arhut but, How much time will take? How much effort?

As I see KDE has decided to go solo with KDE4 and I really hope it work for them.

Freedesktop does not formulate standards in any way. Go to Freedesktop and actually read the FAQ.

And the price was hight.

Not sure what that means, but yes, the price was right.

Yes they will both project had mentioned, read their blogs.

Since both Mozilla and Open Office are cross-platform applications they won't be using Cairo directly. It will be used indirectly through GTK and other software but will not stop people using relevant technology on Windows or Mac.

Its baking its true, but is getting to a point it will be usable for everyone.

It takes years to get a fully usable API to do what people want to do with Cairo (just ask Microsoft) and it doesn't provide everything. Considering other issues that deserve closer attention it is a very long way from being usable. It's not like adding SVG support.

Yes it is.

I suggest you go away and try a system using it for eight or nine hours a day.

Since both Mozilla and Open Office are cross-platform applications they won't be using Cairo directly. It will be used indirectly through GTK and other software but will not stop people using relevant technology on Windows or Mac.

I don't know about OpenOffice, but at Mozilla they are adopting Cairo officially _exactly_ because they are a cross-platform project, as Cairo itself is. See:

Anyway I don't understand all this animosity. I've been following Cairo (that is almost at a 1.0 release and an officially stable API) and it is really nice to work with, or just merely tinker with in my case. It has been proposed as a standard (in the freedesktop.org sense, not as a standard sanctioned by some authority) and free library, and GTK happened to adopt it directly, while QT 4 had yet its own new graphic subsystem.
I don't know Arthur, but I'm sure that as soon as Cairo's api is stable some QT or KDE developers will write wrappers in both directions, and the same will happen under windows with the gdi+ or whatever their new name. After that, we'll need to see all these new libraries at work in practice to recognize their strong and weak points, and every programmer will just work with the API he/she's more comfortable and productive with.
In the meantime, whatever the choices, we'll have finally moved to real resolution-indipendent, and for what is possible GPU-accelerated desktops, and we'll all win.

freedesktop.org is not a formal standards organization
Unlike a standards organization, freedesktop.org is a "collaboration zone" where ideas and code are tossed around

So what does freedesktop.org have to do with the possibility of Cairo to become a standard or not? Since they are not a standardization body, their own words.

Sure Is not "The" standars in Free Desktops, but is a reunion point where projects look up to interoperate between them (like with DBUS, Drag and Drop, Clipboard, etc)so projects can easily interoperate with each other, if you decide go on your own, you are on a risk of other projects not be able to interoperate or use all the power of your tools, that's the importance of FD.org and Cairo as a standar

Sure Is not "The" standars in Free Desktops, but is a reunion point where projects look up to interoperate between them (like with DBUS, Drag and Drop, Clipboard, etc)so projects can easily interoperate with each other

I think what you really want to try and say there is 'interoperate with Gnome and GTK'. *ROTFL*

if you decide go on your own, you are on a risk of other projects not be able to interoperate or use all the power of your tools, that's the importance of FD.org and Cairo as a standar

As even you've said, neither Freedesktop or Cairo are standards.

That's total bottom-of-the-pile crap, and you can't even formulate your answers properly. Nice way to guarantee getting absolutely, totally ignored from now on.

Since both Mozilla and Open Office are cross-platform applications they won't be using Cairo directly. It will be used indirectly through GTK and other software but will not stop people using relevant technology on Windows or Mac.

Who told you that? as far as I now theres no need of GTK for using Cairo in Mozilla or Open Office.

Freedesktop does not formulate standards in any way. Go to Freedesktop and actually read the FAQ

And you read above my reply.

Not sure what that means, but yes, the price was right.

REad "Higjt" not Rigth, as a concecuence of this GNOME SVG librarieas are more advanced and more integrated in GNOME and its anviroment, KDE won't have such luck till
4.0 .. hopely.

[]iIt takes years to get a fully usable API to do what people want to do with Cairo (just ask Microsoft) and it doesn't provide everything. Considering other issues that deserve closer attention it is a very long way from being usable. It's not like adding SVG support. [/i]

Cairo has years in development.

I suggest you go away and try a system using it for eight or nine hours a day.

I had, Foresight Linux is using GTK 2.7 with Cairo enbaled, works like a charm for me.

Not it isn't, and you haven't got a clue what you're talking about:

Cant you link me to the side that show the works of Arthur with Cairo?

Even if they use it as a backend that is adding another layer for something you can work directly.

If bother are configured to use the same backend there will be no difference from below that backend.

For example if you have two APIs for drawing a rectangle, one taking the coordinates of the top left corner and the bottom right corner and one taking the top left corner, width and height, both can create the same rectangle.

For example if you have two APIs for drawing a rectangle, one taking the coordinates of the top left corner and the bottom right corner and one taking the top left corner, width and height, both can create the same rectangle.